Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan is a Central Asian country, with Astana serving as the capital. In the 18th century, the Russians began advancing into the Kazakh step, and the Russian Empire came to rule all of Kazakhstan by the mid-19th century. Following the 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent Russian Civil War, Kazakhstan, after many territorial reorganizations, became a part of the Kazakh SSR of the Soviet Union. On 25 October 1990, the Kazakh SSR declared state sovereignty during the Dissolution of the Soviet Union, and it became the "Republic of Kazakhstan" on 10 December 1991, declaring independence six days later. Kazakstan was the last of the Soviet republics to declare independence, and Nursultan Nazarbayev became the leader of an authoritarian government that ignored human rights and suppressed political opposition. In 2016, Kazakhstan had a population of 17,987,736 people.